and Spanish houses of plaster and brick, with deep gardens where willow and pepper trees, and fuchsias, and great clumps of calla lilies had once flourished—­ were all gone, replaced by modern apartment houses.  But it had been one of the city’s show places fifty years before, when its separate parts had been brought whole “around the Horn” from some much older city, and when homesick pioneer wives and mothers had climbed the board-walk that led to its gate, just to see, and perhaps to cry over, the painted china door-knobs, the colored glass fan-light in the hall, the iron-railed balconies, and slender, carved balustrade that took their hungry hearts back to the decorous, dear old world they had left so far behind them.

Jimmy and Anne Warriner had stumbled upon the Jackson Street cottage five years ago, just before their marriage, and after an ecstatic, swift inspection of it, had raced like children to the agent, to crowd into his willing hand a deposit on the first month’s rent.  Anne had never kept house before, she had no eyes for obsolete plumbing, uneven floors, for the dark cellar sacred to cats and rubbish.  She and Jim chattered rapturously of French windows, of brick garden walks, of how plain little net curtains and Anne’s big brass bowl full of nasturtiums would look on the landing of the absurd little stairway that led from the square hall to two useless little chambers above.

“Jimski—­this floor oiled, and the rug laid cross-wise!  And old tapestry papers from Fredericks!  And the spindle-chair and Fanny’s clock in the hall!”

“And the davenport in the dining-room, Anne,—­there’s no room in here, and your tea-table at the fireplace, with your copper blazer on it!”

“Oh, Jim, we’ll have a place people will talk about!” Anne would sigh happily, after one of these outbursts.  And when they made their last inspection before really coming to take possession of the cottage, she came very close to him,—­Anne was several inches shorter than her big husband-to-be, and when she got as close as this to Jim she had to tip her serious little face up quite far, which Jim found attractive,—­and said, in a little, breathless voice: 

“It’s going to be like a home from the very start, isn’t it, Jim?  And aren’t you glad, Jim, that we aren’t doing exactly what every one else does, that you and I, who are a little different, Jim, are going to keep a little different?  I mean that you really did do unusual work at college, and you really are of a fine family, and I am a Pendeering, and have travelled a lot, and been through Vassar,- -don’t you know, Jim?  You don’t think it’s conceited for us to think we aren’t quite the usual type, just between ourselves?  Do you?”

Jim implied wordlessly that he did not.  And whatever Jim thought himself, he was quite sincere in saying that he believed Anne to be peerless among her kind.

So they came to Jackson Street, and Anne made it quite as quaint and charming as her dreams.  For a year they could not find a flaw in it.